


Unmask Her Beauty To The Moon

by wallflowerdalek



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: F/F, F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:37:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2806268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallflowerdalek/pseuds/wallflowerdalek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Selected Scenes from Hamlet, A Space Opera</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unmask Her Beauty To The Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eak_a_mouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eak_a_mouse/gifts).



Hamlet stands alone in a hall. She stares into space, into the planet that moves like a leviathan in the darkness of the sky behind her. She speaks softly to the stars, but if one were a fly on the wall, one could hear a pained soliloquy, meant only for the ears of ghosts and the vacuum of space.

“Oh God, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. Oh Father, but two months dead—nay, not so much, not two. So excellent a king, so loving to my mother. And yet—within a month—a little month, married with my uncle. My father’s brother! Oh, most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets! But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”

It is not a fly that catches the whispers of Hamlet’s laments, but a friend—the sort of friend who pretends to not understand.

“Hail to your Ladyship.”

She starts, spins. Her hair is down and dark and kinky and endless and it whips through the air, and her dress is a deep purple and gravity-defying and flowing. She’s a whirlpool for a moment, before her eyes—angular and piercing, rough onyx—settle on his face.

“Horatio! I am glad to see you well,” she strides forward and they embrace. Horatio smells like earth and air and Hamlet holds on to him for too long. “What make you from Earth, Horatio?”

“A truant disposition, good my lady,” Horatio smiles easily, but his eyes, as blue as Earth, are heavy.

“I would not hear your enemy say so. I know you are no truant—but what is your affair in Elsinore?”

“I came to see your father’s funeral.”

Hamlet’s face twitches as she responds. “Do not mock me—it was to see my mother’s wedding.”

“Indeed, my lady,” Horatio’s jaw works angrily. He is tall and wide, a bruiser but for his noble birth, with pale complexion and stone-sharp angles. To anger him is to taunt a bull.

Hamlet, the joy seeping out of her palpably, turns back towards the long windows that look over the black, over the moon, over the nothingness near them on this dusty satellite. Horatio touches her back, and it is an intimate gesture.

“Would that I had met my dearest foe in heaven, or ever had I seen that day, Horatio. My father—” Hamlet reaches her hand out to the black, pointing. Horatio and the two men behind him start, squint, searching out the window.

“Where is he, my lady?”

“In my mind’s eye, Horatio.”

Horatio clears his throat. The men behind him exchange a nervous glance. “My lady, I think I saw him yesternight.”

Hamlet turns again, slower. Her face is expressionless, her eyes narrowed. “Saw who?”

“My lady, the King your father.”

Hamlet shakes her head slowly. “The king. My father.”

“Two nights together had these gentleman, Marcellus and Barnardo, on their watch, in the dead waste and middle of the night, been thus encountered you father,” Horatio points out into the darkness. “Thrice he walked by their oppressed and fear-surprised eyes. And I was with them the third night where, as they had delivered, both in time, the apparition comes. I knew your father; these hands are not more like.”

Hamlet takes Horatio’s hands. She is shaking. He is solid. They clutch each other, and though Marcellus and Barnardo stand near, it is a private moment they two have.

“But where was this?” Her voice is a whisper.

“Outside, my lady, outside.”

Hamlet’s eyebrows move, and she looks out into the black, into the vacuum.

“Did you not speak to it?”

“My lady, I did, but answer made it none.”

Hamlet closes her eyes, bows her face. Horatio looks at the top of her head and waits, her servant ever.

She looks, finally, at Marcellus and Barnardo. “This troubles me. Hold you the watch tonight?”

“We do, my lady.”

“I will watch tonight. I’ll speak to it, thought hell itself should gape, and bid me hold my peace.” She wrapped her arms around herself, as if cold, but she shook no more. “If you have hitherto concealed this sight, let it be tenable in your silence still—and whatsomever else shall hap tonight, give it an understanding but no tongue.”

“Our duty to your Honor,” Marcellus and Barnardo intone, bowing their heads.

“Your loves, as mine to you. Farewell,” Horatio touches Hamlet’s hand—they look at each other for one long moment before the three men leave, and Hamlet is left in the hallway alone again. There is no where to sit—it is wide and dark and sterile—but she sinks to her knees and holds her shoulders.

“My father’s spirit. All is not well. I doubt some foul play. Would the night were come! Til then, sit still my soul. Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to our eyes.”

____

Ophelia’s fingers are deep in dirt when Hamlet comes to her. She is in Horticulture, and the air is humid here, and warm, and things grow. She is separating the delicate roots of something green and tall, and soon it will be two plants.

Hamlet climbs into her lap like a terrified puppy. She is shaking. Her hair is untended and lose, and Ophelia calms in with her clean hand while her other disengages from the soil.

“My lady? My lady Hamlet, what bothers you so?”

Hamlet wails, shoving palms into wet eyes before reaching up to touch Ophelia’s soft cheek. Ophelia is like the moon as seen from Earth, pale and round and glorious, and Hamlet is like the moon as they stand on it, now, angeled and beaten by fate. Ophelia’s eyes are deep and brown and her hair, cut short, is yellow. She smiles and leans into Hamlet’s hand.

“My lady,” and the words carry an ocean of depth. Hamlet smiles, fades, clutches at Ophelia, her fingers pressing dents into her skin, a sob tearing from her chest. Ophelia holds her, rocks her, dirt forgotten, smeared with tears as she cradles Hamlet’s face. She kisses her tears—her cheeks—her lips—Hamlet reaches into her silky gold hair and tangles her fingers there, pulls her back—and her sobs turn to gasps as Ophelia slips a hand up her skirt and teases her there. She’s not wearing any underwear. It has been a year since they saw each other, after all, and to hell with taking her time.

Hamlet’s dress comes off in one quick movement, and Ophelia lays her there on the floor. It is warm and there is dirt that has been spilled by careless gardeners, and the smell of Hamlet’s sweat and her sex and the dirt mingle to intoxicate Ophelia. She wants Hamlet to scream, to claw, she wants to control this never stopping force of nature, like a wind storm in a body.

Her breasts are small and Ophelia’s whole mouth can go over them, and it does, it does. Hamlet squirms and moans and she’s so loud, uncontrollable. She bucks and begs and Ophelia puts one milk-white thigh between her legs and Hamlet rubs herself on it, wet and wonderful, and needy, so needy. Ophelia’s mouth is somewhere around her neck and her fingers find Hamlet’s clit and she needs to make her scream louder, louder—

—And when Hamlet has bucked and spent herself and Ophelia’s hand aches with the ferocity of her lover’s need, she begins to cry again.

“My lady, my lady. What troubles you so?”

Hamlet’s eyes are dark and wet and swollen, and she smells like sex and dirt as she whispers. “A ghost.”

She is dressed and gone before Ophelia catches her breath, left only with a cramped hand and an aching heart.

____

Ophelia is standing in a dark hallway and her hand touches smooth metal and she is remembering—

_Sunny days in Laertes’ first ship. It is barely big enough for them all to lay down but they all fit, arms and legs tangled, dreaming. Someday Hamlet will be Queen with Laertes at her right hand and Ophelia at her left and the moon will be theirs._

Ophelia can barely breathe, like the atmospheric processors have stopped, her chest is tight—

_When Hamlet tells her she is leaving for Earth, she tastes of Laertes. It is a familiar taste. She goes to Laertes smelling of Ophelia often enough: it is their dance, and they all know all the parts. Hamlet dances with one sibling and then the other, and there’s no being jealous, not with Hamlet. No one can hold into her; she changes phases so fast, solid to water to plasma._

In the darkness she sings tunelessly to hold off the ghosts. “He is gone, he is gone/ No, no, he is dead./ Go to thy deathbed./ He never will come again.”

_Legs tangled in Laertes first ship, in a high orbit over that blue planet. The reflected light is blue on their skin, dim and strange, and Ophelia doesn’t know whose hand is whose, and whose moan that was, and she doesn’t mind, it all makes sense, it all fits, they’re so tangled, a briar, and oh, what glorious roses._

“He will never come again./ He is gone, he is gone.” Ophelia’s voice barely cuts through the darkness, and she is shaking, but the smooth metal under her fingers is warm, and her father’s casket floats out in space, cold. That she should be so warm seems vulgar, now.

_Hamlet is gone, to school on Earth, and Laertes is assigned to the black, and Ophelia keeps her council at night and waits for her brother, for her lover, for someone, anyone, to come back to her. At least her father has not left her. At least she has him to care for her._

Her father is cold, she is warm, and it is vulgar, it is wrong.

The hatch slips open so easily. The seal breaks, and Ophelia’s thoughts are a briar of arms and legs and love as her blood finds the temperature of space.

____

Laertes is collecting her body when Hamlet’s spaceship returns from Earth. He sees Hamlet’s fingers twined with Horatio’s as their viewscreens flicker, and behind him, the King’s whispers are poison.


End file.
